Systems for searching and organizing the Internet are, not surprisingly, extremely important in today's world for finding articles relevant to a particular search query. Furthermore, it is often desirable to dynamically promote some relevant articles on each search, according to certain rules. For example, it is possible to define a promotion rule including various terms and then directly promote the most relevant article associated with that rule as the first search result. Thus, a user searching for a query containing the search terms or keywords, in any order, will match the promotion rule and will result in the correct article being promoted as the first search result.
Known methods for matching promotion rules are unsatisfactory in a number of respects. For example, such methods are generally not efficient and not scalable to thousands of promotions. Some systems, for example, examine matching rules with a brute force, linear iteration over all rules, and support only full-query matching. That means that the promotion rule will be matched only if the search query is exactly the same and in the same order as the search terms. This method also requires scanning all rules sequentially, which take a prohibitive length of time for thousand of such rules.
Accordingly, methods and systems are desired for improved rule-based promotion of search results.